Mistress Belcolore

Mistress Belcolore’s brief affair with the parish priest of Varlungo is driven as much by bargaining as by desire: she sets a price, takes his cloak as a pledge, and is then outmaneuvered when he recovers it through a domestic errand. The story makes her neither a silent object of clerical appetite nor the winner of the exchange. She speaks plainly about what she wants, recognizes the priest’s habit of promising without performing, and ends with a compromise that is comic but materially unlike the payment she first demanded.

Identity and Setting

Mistress Belcolore lives in Varlungo, a village near the storytellers’ present surroundings, and is the wife of the husbandman Bentivegna del Mazzo. The narrator presents her as a vigorous, buxom countrywoman, brown-favoured and tight-made, skilled at working the mill. Her identity is also marked by musical and communal accomplishments: she plays the tabret, sings, and can lead the haye and the round. These abilities make her conspicuous within her neighbourhood, while the story’s rustic setting gives its courtship a practical vocabulary of household work, borrowed implements, clothes, and provisions.

The parish priest has singled her out among his female parishioners. On Sundays he watches for her in church and makes an elaborate show of singing when she is present, but hurries through that part of the service when she is absent. He also visits women of the parish unusually diligently and brings small gifts: a clove of garlic from his own garden, peascods, chives, scallions, or a candle-end. To Belcolore he adds sidelong looks and friendly jokes. She affects not to notice his advances and passes on demurely, so that his attentions do not immediately secure the intimacy he wants.

The Bargain and the Affair

An opportunity opens when Bentivegna leaves for Florence on business, carrying goods and expecting to seek help with a court summons. The priest learns that Belcolore is alone and goes to her house. She has come down from the hay-loft and is picking over cabbage-seed when he presses her about refusing him. His appeal turns on the claim that what he desires is something God commands; she answers by challenging the respectability of priests who behave this way. Their exchange makes the cleric’s appetite explicit, but it also gives Belcolore room to negotiate rather than simply submit.

When the priest offers her shoes, a head-lace, or a waistband, Belcolore rejects these as things she already has enough of and asks for a service instead. She needs five crowns before Saturday to retrieve her watchet gown and Sunday girdle from pawn, so that she can take her spun wool to Florence and have her spinning-wheel mended. The request is specific and immediate: money would restore clothes she needs for church and other decent occasions. She warns that priests are notorious for stinginess and recalls another woman who had been cast off without provision. Her scepticism is not an abstract complaint; it is the reason she insists on security before agreeing to the encounter.

The priest says he does not have the money with him and does not want to leave while he has found her alone. To win her confidence, he pledges his blue-cloth cloak, boasting of its quality and repeating what it supposedly cost. Belcolore questions its value but accepts the pledge before consenting. She then takes him into the barn, where they kiss and sleep together. The priest returns to the parsonage in his cassock, presenting himself as though he had merely come from a wedding service. Belcolore has obtained a tangible guarantee, but the arrangement is already vulnerable: the cloak is in her keeping, while the promised crowns have not been delivered.

The Cloak Recovered

Afterwards, the priest calculates that the candle-ends he receives in offerings would not amount to half the five crowns and regrets leaving his cloak behind. He devises a way to recover it without paying. The next day, a holiday, he asks Belcolore to lend him her stone mortar so he can make sauce for guests. She sends it over. Near dinner, when Bentivegna and Belcolore are eating together, the priest sends the mortar back with a message requesting the cloak that the boy had left as a token.

The return message exposes Belcolore to her husband without openly explaining the pledge. Bentivegna angrily assumes that she has taken security from the priest and orders her to return it, threatening to strike her if she does not. He tells her that in future the priest’s requests should not be refused, even if he asks for their ass. Belcolore grumbles but retrieves the cloak from the chest and gives it to the clerk. Her parting message makes clear that she understands the priest has used the mortar to reverse the exchange: he has taken back his pledge while leaving her without the five crowns.

The priest answers with a bawdy joke about the mortar and pestle, presenting the two as instruments that can be withheld from one another in repayment. Bentivegna thinks Belcolore is merely complaining because he scolded her and takes no heed of the message. The trick succeeds materially, but it does not restore the priest’s standing with Belcolore. She bears him a grudge and keeps him at arm’s length until vintage-time.

Reconciliation and Narrative Significance

The estrangement ends not with the promised money but with a threat: the priest says he will cause Belcolore to go into the mouth of Lucifer. Frightened, she makes peace with him over must and roast chestnuts, and they resume their affair repeatedly. Instead of the five crowns, he has new parchment fitted to her tabret and adds a cast of hawk’s bells, with which she is content. The ending records a settlement, but not an exact fulfilment of the original bargain: her pawned clothes and immediate need for money have disappeared from the negotiation, while a musical instrument receives the priest’s eventual payment.

The tale is introduced as a comic village love-affair and as a warning that priests are not always to be believed. That framing shapes Belcolore’s portrayal. The priest’s religious office sits beside his pursuit of parishioners, his use of churchly language to justify desire, and his calculated recovery of the cloak. Belcolore, meanwhile, identifies his evasions, demands a concrete pledge, and voices her displeasure when he takes it back. Yet Bentivegna’s intervention leaves her exposed to the consequences of a secret transaction, and the priest’s threat helps bring about the eventual reconciliation. Her wit and bargaining power are real, but the outcome remains uneven: she receives neither the promised crowns nor the clothes they were meant to release, only the tabret repairs and bells with which the story closes.